About the monitor
Disturbance watches a curated list of 57 South African betting and gaming websites and publishes whether each one is reachable. This page explains exactly how that works, because anyone who finds our bot in their logs deserves a straight answer.
What we check, and how often
Every fifteen minutes, around the clock, we request the homepage of each monitored site from Cloudflare's network edge. We wait up to twelve seconds for an answer, record the HTTP status code and the time taken, then discard the response without rendering it. That is the entire interaction: one request, no crawling, no link following, no content stored.
How to identify our requests
Our checks carry this user agent, and only this one:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DisturbanceBot/1.0; +https://disturbance.co.za/about-the-monitor/)Requests arrive from Cloudflare Workers infrastructure rather than a fixed IP, so the user agent is the reliable way to spot us.
What counts as a disturbance
We deliberately set a conservative bar, because wrongly calling a working site broken is worse than missing a wobble.
- Operating normally: the site answered with any status below 500. A security screen or a bot challenge still counts as operating, because it proves the servers are alive and responding.
- Disturbance detected: the site returned a server error in the 500 range, or sent no answer at all within twelve seconds.
We measure reachability from one vantage point, not correctness. A site can be reachable and still have a broken deposit flow, and a site can be unreachable from our edge while working fine on your connection. Every status page says when it was last checked so you can judge how current the answer is.
How the list is chosen
The list is curated rather than open, which keeps the checks light and the pages meaningful. It covers the South African betting and gaming sites people search for most, and we add to it as the market moves. Every site on the list is measured the same way, on the same schedule, and published whatever the result.
Data we keep
Per check we store the site, the timestamp, the HTTP status code and the response time in milliseconds. Individual checks are kept for fourteen days to calculate uptime over 24 hours and 7 days, then deleted. We store no page content and no visitor data from the monitored sites.
Ask us to remove your site
If you operate a monitored site and want it gone from Disturbance, say so and it is removed the same day. The same address works for correcting anything on your page, or for telling us a status is wrong.
Frequently asked questions
I found DisturbanceBot in my server logs. What is it?
It is the monitoring agent behind disturbance.co.za. It requests your homepage once every fifteen minutes to record whether your site is reachable, and nothing else. It does not crawl, index, scrape content or follow links.
How do I stop you from checking my site?
Email the address below and we will remove your domain the same day, no questions asked. You can also block the user agent; we treat a block as a request to stop and will remove the site rather than work around it.
Does this affect my analytics or bandwidth?
The bot makes about 96 requests a day and discards the response body without rendering, so it costs a few hundred kilobytes daily. It runs no JavaScript, so analytics that rely on a browser will not record it.
Why does my site show as operating when it is broken?
We check reachability, not correctness. If your server answers, we record it as operating even when a page behind the homepage is failing. We would rather under-report a problem than accuse a working site of being down.